Skip to main content

Apr 18, 2019

Caught in the act — Elements of an Emerging Theory of Complex Adaptive Processes and their Applications

Date: April 18, 2019 | 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Speaker: Rudolf Hanel, MedUni Wien
Location: Mondi Seminar Room 3, Central Building

The systems we commonly address as complex adaptive systems share a number of features, which make the analysis of such systems or attempts to predict their evolution challenging, to say the least. Those systems typically are

(a) out-of-equilibrium systems, and therefore the states describing such systems are non-equilibriums states, which are (in comparison to equilibrium states) atypical. In other words, non-equilibrium steady states exhibit structure, which equilibrium states do not exhibit.

(b) The phase-space or sample-space of such systems typically is not static. Innovation and destructive events constantly
alter the space of available choices and their adjacent possibilities. This has fundamental implications for the mathematical methods and models that are adequate in the context of such processes. The naive ensemble picture of statistical physics typically will fail us. Complex adaptive systems operate

(c) in a path dependent, open ended, and

(d) irreversible way, i.e. the mathematics of quasi stationary thermodynamics will typically fail us, too. Finally,

(e) many such systems of interest to us, include human societies or the entire human species as components. This reflexive situation introduces all sorts of complications including the fact that there emerges an interface intrinsic to complexity science, connecting science with what I'd call "art".

At this interface questions and their answers necessarily cease to be purely scientific, meaning that they shift their focus from the informational aspects of communication to the relational aspects, defining and constructing relations between things that otherwise remain arbitrary. Deterministic Chaos and Quantum Mechanics have their own facts constraining the predictability of systems in the focus of their interests. Complexity adds another one; the reality of choice. We will take a brief stroll through the cognitive landscape of complex adaptive systems, their applications, and implications, and the important (and often neglected) role constructivism plays in science, being a physically embodied adaptive complex process on its own, that cannot simply be reduced to mere empiricism or reductionism, without violating the integrity of the scientific process itself .

More Information:

Date:
April 18, 2019
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Speaker:
Rudolf Hanel, MedUni Wien

Location:
Mondi Seminar Room 3, Central Building

Contact:

BOOCOCK Daniel

Email:
dboocock@ist.ac.at

Share

facebook share icon
twitter share icon


sidebar arrow up
Back to Top